De Beers Deploys 10-Gigabit Ethernet

International mining giant the De Beers group has completed an enterprise effort to deploy 10-Gigabity Ethernet technology throughout its South Africa corporate offices as well as its mining sites. The enhanced network, say officials, will support the secure delivery of critical SAP data to increase productivity across all business operations. The main reason for the upgrade of its network backbone was to ensure higher levels of security, availability and throughput for a new SAP system it is in the process of deploying across its South African sites.

The mining concern selected the Enterasys Secure Networks solution as well as the ER-16 routers. The solution includes 10-Gigabit Ethernet technology from ER-16 routers at the network core, ensuring high performance. The remainder of the network features Enterasys Matrix N-Series switches at the distribution layer to provide a high-performance infrastructure within a secure networking environment.

DeBeers was also looking for a networking solution that could support policy-based networking, per-user authentication, quality of service and advanced network management to maximize network availability and ensure business continuity.